


The shadows know me, let's leave the world behind

by Artherra



Series: After Hell [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: After Hell universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boy King of Hell Sam Winchester, Dark Sam Winchester, Dark fic, Gen, OC - Jeremiah, OC -Saarghmae, Post-Canon, hunters are assholes, tw gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 21:56:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17271845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artherra/pseuds/Artherra
Summary: The psychic was dealt with quickly and mercilessly.Jeremiah knew hunters never liked long processes - courts were as fast as they could make them.Subjects were guilty until proven innocent. Hunter laws were simple enough to be understood by a teenager, some of them unofficial like in the old age of Athens before Solon swooped in and wrote the first Athenian constitution.Hunters had no Solon.





	The shadows know me, let's leave the world behind

The psychic was dealt with quickly and mercilessly.  
Jeremiah knew hunters never liked long processes - courts were as fast as they could make them.  
Subjects were guilty until proven innocent. Hunter laws were simple enough to be understood by a teenager, some of them unofficial like in the old age of Athens before Solon swooped in and wrote the first Athenian constitution.

Hunters had no Solon. 

Carrie, an ironic name for a demon-blood psychic, couldn’t even aim for a more “liberal” lawyer as others could.  
Hunters couldn’t wait to see her go up in salted flames, predisposed to hate anything demon-related, regardless of if it killed or didn’t. All of them worked so hard to battle demons, to erase them for good.  
Even the word “demon” made them bare both their opinions and their teeth.

She cried through the whole process and nobody cared.

Not even the non-hunters helped her, just stared, recited the laws without feeling, like if empathy was no longer a thing if somebody got fucked over by a demon some time ago.

The pyre was wooden, a lockable casket on a wooden structure, salted and poured over by gasoline. Her screaming was muffled as she burned.

Jeremy shouldn’t be so shocked. Psychics were nothing more to the hunters than a bitter memory of what the younger Winchester had become. 

They burned them while screaming curses on the dead man’s name. Nothing personal against psychics, just blind hate and disgust.

Jeremy screamed with them when he had to. Hunted the demon children down as if he was a normal hunter. But he wasn’t.

Truth be told, he existed as one of the last psychics on Earth, the last generation that knew their powers.  
Maybe there were more, nobody knew. Those who admitted went out like candles in the breeze, one by one, burning in a salted casket.

Jeremy held out by keeping close to the hunters, by knowing what tricks they used. It was a constant race to keep up.  
Their methods were getting better day by day, eventually good enough to be able to recognize psychics by localization spells, which Jeremy conquered by several protection spells he morphed together in his own workshop.  
He lived in fear that one day he would slip, just a little, except he wouldn’t burn like the rest if them.

Hunters hated psychics, but they hated traitors even more. The strategy he was using seemed more and more like balancing on a rope above a sea of fire, not seeing where it ends, if it’s even worth it. One slip up and he’d die the most awful of deaths.

They’d call him a traitor, call him a demon whore, give him the most brutal punishment they’d come up with.  
So he kept quiet.

As far as he knew, he was alone. The only psychic under the wide umbrella of the hunting profession.

That was, until he saw the invitation.

He kept online on secret psychic forums across multiple websites, hidden under codenames and slang, entirely in plain sight but so much harder to find. It wasn’t the safest option, nor the most practical one but again - when the hunters improved so much, what was safe?

Living stranded from civilisation as far away from hunters as one could get meant not being able to keep up and getting found because of a newest invention about which one had no idea.

And living like Jeremiah did, in the darkest place under the hunters’ candlestick - it was almost the same, only the fear was more...specific.

The invitation stared at him, exciting and terrifying all at once. It could be a trap, but it could be the salvation he was waiting for, the chance for them to unite and take their lives back.

He took it.

\--------------------

Finding an excuse to disappear for a few days wasn’t hard - hunters were cautious, but they were also loners. Not exactly the type of people who’d keep track of other people’s business. Well, only if it didn’t benefit them in some way, or fit into their definition of protective paranoia.  
It took just a vague murmur of a possible case and he was out.

A simple, well-kept cottage stood on the end of the drive, the GPS announcing “Your destination is on the left” in a cheerful female voice as he rounded the corner and found a place to park on a meadow-sized patch of mown down grass.

Several cars were already there. He had to wait for a red sedan to finish aligning with the imaginary lines, before he parked his car next to it.  
He saw the middle-aged woman climb out of the car and leave as he gathered his things and made the precautions.

The door surprisingly didn’t make a sound when he entered, but the floorboards betrayed him anyway, announcing his arrival better than a doorbell could do.  
It had to be an old hunting cottage - a demon’s trap was drawn on the floor behind the door, instead of on the ceiling.

He thought of the demon traps still drawn in hunter’s centers. They served more as decorations than anything else as there was no use for them anymore.

His heart was in his throat, the anxiety making his fingers tremble just a little. The hunter profession taught him better than to reveal what he felt - a lesser man might’ve been in a fully body tremble right about then.

He counted nine people, some talking in a smaller group of four, the rest sitting on the multiple chairs and sofas.  
They shot him a glance, cautious and distrustful. He mirrored them.

“One more to go,” one of the standing people announced, nursing a glass of wine. She moved to him, switched hands and stared into his eyes with her own - grey, stormy and mischievous. She offered him a hand. “Welcome to the meeting. You may know me as Lillian.”

He shook her hand, wincing internally at how cold it was. Her grip was firm.  
“I’m Jack,” he used his pseudonym. It was second nature at this point - none of them knew their real names and probably never will.

She introduced him to the others of her more active group, he nodded silently at the names, shook their hands.

The seated individuals didn’t offer, probably waiting for the whole ordeal to start before any socializing.  
He took a glass and poured himself some beer before sitting down to wait as well, while listening to the conversation that went on and on without general theme, topics picked like numbers on a roulette and discarded as quickly.

When he was down a glass and a half and the little-talk neared its demise, he heard the sound of a car ignition shutting off from the outside.

A young woman came through the door a few seconds after.

She seemed somehow different than the others, caught his eye for a reason he wasn’t able to find.

The first thing he noticed were the white scars across her face, claw marks that ran from above her left ear to her lips, the lines well visible on the bridge of her nose and around her eyes. Several tiny scars accompanied them on all of her visible skin - Daniel couldn’t assign a source for most of them. Needles, fangs, knives? It was all a guess, an uncomfortable one as well. It was also a guess he made often - hunters had scars everywhere, maybe she was one. (He once heard that the king of Hell had no battle scars, that his skin was clean as marble, disgustingly inhuman. It was interesting info to find.)

She was well dressed, a loose plaid coat open and flailing as she moved, an outfit perfectly suited for the early fall. Her raven-black hair was tied in a messy bun in what he assumed was a last-minute decision.  
A pentagram hung from her neck, dangling on a loose leather string that had surely seen better days.

She smirked at the demon trap before stepping over it, no problem, just like anybody else. 

“What’s up?” She announced as she walked up to them with malicious light in her eyes and a grin on her face.

He heard one of the sitting men murmur “the sky,” under his breath. The newcomer stared at him in a quick impulse of fury.  
Somebody laughed.

The atmosphere went back to zero in a few seconds, but Daniel still had the feeling that something else was in the room, entered it like a breeze, settled down like a cat coming home, unseen and watching. 

Lilian downed the rest of her wine, her gulps audible in the pressing silence, and began:

“I’d never have thought so many of you would show up, but anyway,” she paused and set the empty glass on a table behind her.

“I believe we’ve all gathered here with one goal in mind - that is, to create an opposition against the frankly cruel and unfair tyranny of hunters.”

She spoke in formal words, giving a speech like if she was used to do so. 

It was a stark contrast - hunters never talked formally, their brutality and masculinity showing in how they spoke - savage and uncompromising. Loud words, harsh gestures with little meaning behind them outside of pure hatred.

“They robbed us of our freedom, of our lives, because of nothing than paranoia and false belief. We have to make that right.”

He almost wanted to tell her to cut the bullshit, like any hunter would do. 

She continued on, summarizing what he already knew, information that a normal civilian wouldn't even be able to guess while a good hunter could recite in their sleep.  
His gaze trailed off.

He stared into the windows, a solemn forest setting slowly into sleep, the sun golden and red, coating the trees in coppery light.

It was a few minutes in before he noticed movement, out of the corner of his eye. Outside of the cottage.  
Somebody was out there, and if was definitely not a late arrival.

“Uh, guys-“ he began, standing up.

The doors burst open, slammed into the wall, floorboards groaning under the weight of multiple men.

He immediately drew his gun and prepared to shoot.

His eyes met the barrel of a rifle.

The hunter holding the rifle laughed, his companions following.

Old, cocky, merciless.

“You thought you could have a little meeting,” he sneered, “and not raise any alarms?”

He adjusted his grip on the gun, his hands scarred and rough. Dark eyes peered from the shadow under the baseball cap, gaze filled with blood-thirst Jeremiah knew all too well, hoped he’d never meet.

“Give me the gun, demon,” he ordered, staring straight at Jeremiah.  
“Shoot once and I’ll reserve you a seat for Lucifer’s judgement.”

Jeremy’s breath was stolen away.

Lucifer’s judgement was a trial made for demons, a trial so brutal and severe it caused the last King of Hell to retreat his demons in fear. 

He thought it was buried with the collapse of Hell, never to return when there were no demons left.

But hunters had no concept of far reach, did they?

He dropped the weapon between one breath and the next, his gaze following it as it skittered across the uneven floor. 

He heard hitched breaths, his eyes lifting, unable yet to meet the gaze of hunters.

The woman who came in last stood in the corner, hand against the wall, her eyes filled with terror and something darker.

The presence he felt grew stronger, coiled like smoke - warm feeling sliding across his legs.

He tasted copper, but he wasn’t bleeding.

“Good boy, Jeremy,” the hunter’s voice catched a malicious tone.

“But you know what we do to traitors,” the man shook his head, ordering the rest of them to advance, guns aimed and eyes hardened.

“You’re a traitor,” there it was, “a traitor of the highest class. You’ve earned your seat already and you know how it goes… I cannot miss such an event.”

They called psychics demons, but really, all hunters were missing were the raven black-coated eyes.

It wasn’t always like this. It all died with Hell. 

Everything died with Hell.

His hands started shaking for real, he noticed as he was lifting them above his head when the hunter ordered him to do so.

All the others did the same. Except her.

The woman was still in his line of vision, one of the hunters heightening their voice when she didn’t comply. 

The man with a baseball cap reached forward, grabbed her hand and jerked her to him, cocking his gun and pushing the barrel to her temple in the process. 

No hesitation, just hatred in channeled from hunter to hunter, centuries-old and everlasting.

The woman screamed and freed her hand, twisted away from the gun. Blinked.

He wondered why the hunter didn’t shoot immediately, didn’t wonder anymore when he looked into her face.

Almost hidden by the raven-black hair, her eyes were shining white. 

Pure and clear white, the color of the innocent. G-dly, angelic. And yet...

“Enough!” She pushed the man away, shouting. He stumbled back and fell, his gun going off.

Jeremiah would use that chaos to overpower his captor, the chance perfectly timed, but he couldn’t. His body was frozen in place, awaiting something he didn’t know.

Several guns went off, accompanied by shouts and curses, the hunters not yet realizing that the fight was lost.

The woman turned to dust and smoke before the bullets could hit.

This couldn’t be real. 

The smoke coiled and danced into an abstract shape, filling the room with the smell of burnt flesh, melted metal, blood and sulphur.  
It hit him with an unexpected intensity, like stepping through the door of an industrial factory or falling into a coal mine.

It gained shape a second or two after, a growl leaving the giant form. 

The shadows of fangs, claws and long, battered wings danced around the room in the golden light of the setting sun. Beautiful and terrifying.

Its wings hit the walls, tumbled an old painting off the wall.

The creature landed, wolfish and four-legged, its glossy claws clicking against the wooden floor. 

Something like a pressure wave hit them all, laid them across the floor, definitely not caring if it hurt.

The hunter closest to the beast crawled back in a weak attempt to escape, whimpering, trying to reach the weapon which had fallen from his grip.

White eyes stared him down.

“Die, in the name of the Highest,” the beast began, slow and formal, like an incarnation. Its voice was harsh, unnatural, tone cold like siberian winter and impersonal, like an anonymous fist thrown in a crowd.

“Die at the claws of His executioner, the judgement of the only rightful king.”

The hunters tried to move, squirmed against the invisible bonds, but they were stuck in place, the beast’s power pinning them down like insects on an exhibition.

The beast continued.

“Lucifer’s judgement - hunter’s judgement - it means nothing to us and never will.  
So, in the name of the Highest,”

Blood trickled down the creature’s scarred snout as it moved. It contrasted bright against the dark, knotted fur and pink scars, painted them with a river delta of crimson.

The monster - demon, dragon, whatever the fuck it were - arched its neck, spread its wings, bared its fangs and its voice.

“Die.”

It was as quick as death can get, a single jump forward and a snap of jaws.

The wolf bit out the hunter's vocal chords, spit the offending lump of bloody matter out as the body fell on the ground lifelessly.

The other hunters couldn't give out anything more than helpless whimpers.

The wolf shook its head, gazed its shining eyes across the room, searching for another victim, tongue sliding over its bloody fangs.

“That was meant for all of you.”

Without a single warning, two other psychics changed their forms. The quiet, sarcastic guy and a woman he didn’t get to know dissolved into dark, furious smoke.

With loud thumps and creaking of wood, two more creatures hit the ground and spread their wings, their forms different and uncanny.

The main difference was their eyes shining black.

The beasts didn’t wait for another second, leaping for the hunters’ throats, tearing them to pieces with their fangs and claws as Jeremiah couldn't do anything other than watch.

Blood soaked into the floorboards.

The massacre was quick and messy, left streaks and stains of blood everywhere like an abstract artistic piece of horror and misery.

“As for the rest of you,” the white-eyed demon announced, “we have work for you, safe from hunters, safe from their rotten practices. And we aren't going to ask.”

He didn’t have time to react before the demon jumped on him.

The demon’s tone changed, more feminine and deeply sarcastic, little drops of blood flying off of the fangs as she spoke.  
“You were chosen in the name of the king, so, buddy, you better buckle up.”

He tried to fight, struggled in the clawed grip, but it held him tight.

The creature took flight, the wings beating against the ground on the corners of his vision. 

He noticed the burns littering the otherwise eerie and elegant form at the wing tips, feathers missing like hawks’ in the middle of the molting season.

Thee roof broke in a single telepathic blow.  
Splinters of birch wood skittered across the grass outside and caught in the trees. 

The creature turned and sped up, gliding through the heavy air of the evening, rising up and carrying him off to G-d knows where.

He saw the other creatures following, each carrying a victim of their own.

He fought for his voice, his throat clogged with bile and undone screams.

“Who the fuck are you? Where the Hell are you taking us?”

She had to scream out so that he’d hear her in the shrieking of the wind.

“Funnily, you answered the second one yourself.”

His breath hitched. “No.”

She laughed, high and malicious.

“The only way we can go now is down, my boy,” she said before folding her wings and straightening her spine - falling towards the ground like a missile at an enormous speed.

Fighting was useless, he knew, but human brains weren’t perfect.

Before he thought they'd hit the ground and die with their spines snapped and bones crushed, the creature suddenly spread her wings again and turned, the movement sending her into a calculated spiral.

They passed through the ground.

Shapes of the world twisted and liquified, the landscape folding into itself and letting them go like if somebody rolled the world into a funnel.

Everything slowed down, his body feeling like a brick wall that just couldn’t move and couldn’t listen while the surroundings passed by oh so slowly. He blinked, felt like if it lasted a century before his eyes opened again.  
He could see every individual movement, every individual feather, everything slow and wrong like an out of body experience.

Fire exploded from where the monster’s head was in streaks of orange and read light that spread in veins and mixed with the twisted colors of everything else.  
The experience was both beautiful and disorientating, before it passed like if they had hit a wall.

A bang. Flash of red light.

The world sped up and devolved into fast moving chaos.

They were falling through the air, the world turning around them, both too bright and too dark.

If the demon didn’t get the flight under control, they would crash into whatever was down there, and Jeremiah wasn't exactly keen on finding out.

The air smelled like sulphur, blood and and a faraway but pleasant scent of roses.

Out of the corner of his vision, monster’s fluttering wings were burning with red-green sparkles like tiny fireworks, feathers melting and falling off rapidly, unable to stop the fall.

The monster shrieked.

The landing was tough and painful, the force of it separating him from the demon.  
He couldn’t find the strength to stand when he stopped rolling.

When he gazed up, he saw slowly rolling black fog and moving shapes, thousands of them, either small and fast or giant, building-size, littered with little lights and fires.

Something like a sun was trying to fight the thick fog from somewhere far away.

He sat up, taking in his surroundings.

Everything was moving, the world’s features made of decorated stone and metal. A giant set of gears spinned and moved where the platform ended in a sharp, polished edge. 

The After-Hell was mechanic, like a spacious clockwork - moving and grinding in loud, repetitive sequences. Thousands of tiny actions happened every second, the air moved constantly with each of them, creating a slight breeze helping the creatures easily glide to where they wanted to.

Hundreds of monsters flew the air, headed and organised like cars on a busy intersection.

It was breathtaking.

Movement brought his eyes back to the monster which, still heaving, accessed itself and shook its no longer burning wings, presumably to get rid of the unsalvageable feathers.

The demon stared at him, its white eyes fitting with the palette of everything around and simultaneously standing out of the background.

It breathed in deep and exhaled, sounding exhausted and relieved.

“Welcome to Hell,” she said, voice hoarse.

The demon sat still for a while, gathering strength, while Jeremiah tried to understand what the hell (oh, the irony) he was seeing.

It spoke again after a while, standing on all its fours, the focused and determined stare returning into her eyes, making him notice that it ever left

“We’re late to the invitation. The Highest won't appreciate if somebody else’ll lead it, so you better strap in - it’s kind of a long way from here.”

The second time she gripped him and lifted him into the air was softer, if not less stressful.

He didn’t even have time to prepare himself before she dove into the surrounding fog.

The demon took sharp turns and frequent drops, flying through the moving mechanisms, opening and rapidly closing gates and objects that lifted and fell in repeated movements. 

Her battered wings didn’t handle it well.  
He could tell from the times she grazed objects, had to run across platforms to gain momentum or lost all of it by crashing into platforms and moving gears.

All the other creatures moved out of her way for a reason he didn’t know, their eyes cautious, passing by them like headlights of cars. Most of them were red, one of two black. A single being flew closer and gave out a few clicking sounds like a greeting, its multitude of eyes shining white.

Three demons caught on their pace, followed them in an arrow-point formation. They exchanged sounds, brief conversations in silent bird-like chirps and wolfish growls.

The demon carrying him replied to their existence with a few clicks of its own and Jeremiah could feel the sounds’ creation in the demon’s chest. 

He kept silent, not wanting to end up worse than he already did.

As far as he knew, they needed him for something. The king, oh, how he didn’t want to think about that, chose him for something. They wouldn’t kill him right away, but it was pretty apparent that they were demons - the sadistic beings addicted to torture and apathetic, uncaring.

The temperature increased suddenly, and he glanced down to the source, finding a giant ball of fire and melted metal spinning in an clockwork-like mechanism, its energy creating a flow of hot air rising upwards that the demons catched on and rose higher.

It looked like a star, Betelgeuse specifically, something he saw the one time he paid attention while watching tv as a background for his research.

When the demon passed a giant gate decorated with gold, the air became warm and heavy, not unlike noon in Phoenix, at the same rate as the amount of demons they met decreased.

The room between moving objects decreased as well. He wasn’t sure how his stomach could handle all the toss and turns so far.

He wasn’t prepared for it when she dropped him.

He was too caught up in staring at the masterfully decorated machines, watching their movements as they glinted when rising and then burrowed in shadows again and again.

He landed roughly on a paved platform, staring up immediately to curse the demon for not even giving him a warning, but the rant died in his throat when he saw all the psychics were there.

The woman who had began the meeting, Lillian, rushed to him, helped him stand, fear bright and apparent in her eyes.

“Are you okay?” She asked. 

He shook it off with a simple: “Yeah.” He rubbed his sore shoulder. “Something’s gonna happen, I don’t know what.” He said, looking up.

The demon sat there on a stone pedestal, looking at them from above. Other demons surrounded her and the whole platform sitting along moving machinery, fires and surprisingly lively trees.

The other psychics followed his gaze, falling quiet.

The demon seemed to be waiting for that.

“Welcome, children of Hell,” she started, gesturing with her arms, clawed and black, but otherwise surprisingly human-like.

“The world above has forsaken you. Your families have forsaken you. But our King, oh bless the Highest, he is there to save you, sent us to bring you here. Welcome, to your true home.” She spread her wings at the last statement, allowing them to see the mixed palette of colors ranging from white and yellow to obsidian black, glistening in the orange light and coffee-brown where the wings had burned and empty spaces remained after lost feathers. 

Lillian retaliated almost instantly.

“What if we don’t want this?!”

The demon stared at her.

“Are you sure?” She laughed, her subordinates following. The movement, if only slight, shook her entire form down to her wingtips. “We offer exactly what you said, even more, with only one condition - the following of and trust in the only King and His High court.”

The woman shut up, trying to come up with a defense but clearly not finding one.

Jeremiah took her place.

“Who even are you?”

The question definitely caught the demon’s attention, her head tilting.

“What’s up with the accusatory tone? I never harmed you - I thought we were beginning to understand each other,” it was clearly a joke, but one that still made Jeremiah feel like a child. On purpose, of course.

The demon turned its head back to stare at everybody, set up a neutral expression.

“My name is Saarghmae and I am the leader of His High court and the King’s Executioner.” She switched back to an informal tone after that announcement and finished with a joke.  
“I am too a psychic, but with many intricate rituals and proper training under my King, I have become what I am now, a destiny you all will share - and it comes with amazing eye colors, you see,” she blinked at them, her white eyes flaring brighter for a second, a thin stream of smoke coming off of them for a few seconds after that.

She waited a moment or two. Jeremiah could feel each of them searching for questions to ask.

She grew impatient quickly. “All questions that you may have will be answered later, as I have other matters to attend to. My subordinates will lead you to your quarters quickly,” she looked around at the demons below her.

“Good luck and bless the Highest,” she announced with one last nod and then she took off. The demons exchanged sounds between them, coming closer.

They were no threat, at least supposedly, but their forms still made Jeremiah want to bail.

He exchanged scared looks with the rest of the psychics.

“It’s okay,” slipped from his mouth, as much directed at all of them as it was to himself.

They’ll do this. They’ll survive.

He voiced it aloud, hoped it would give them at least a tiny semblance of hope. 

He squared his shoulders, and when his name was called by a black-eyed monster looking like a mutant between a scorpion and a wasp, he followed it with whatever pride he could muster up.

**Author's Note:**

> I somehow got really into the universe i built in my previous one shot, so here you go! I'll probably write more for this someday. Title is from the song "Darkside" by Alan Walker.


End file.
